Computer - November 2009 (Vol. 42, No. 11)

Computer

Sponsored Topics: Conferences - Computer Science - Journal - Math - Publications

PrePrint: Programming Multiprocessors with Explicitly Managed Memory Hierarchies

Some emerging heterogenous multiprocessors have explicitly managed memory hierarchies (EMM), a memory architecture that requires programmers to explicitly manage data movement. This task can be complex and error-prone even for experts. We compare two programming models for the Cell BE that manage this complexity for the programmer, paying attention to programmability and performance. The first programming model, Cellgen, is a new framework which provides OpenMP-like semantics and the abstraction of a shared address space divided into private and shared data. The second, Sequoia, abstracts the memory hierarchy as private address spaces, each corresponding to a parallel task. We compare two applications programmed using these models against expertly hand-tuned counterparts in terms of abstractions, programming complexity and performance.

Sponsored Topics: Computer programming - Parallel computing - OpenMP - Programming - Cell